Why Are Moomins So White?

3,181 words

As you may have noticed, the Moomins have white skin. This automatically makes them potentially “problematic” for some people. Are they just white neo-Nazis in disguise? It depends who you ask.

Being a race of hippo-like, blue-eyed Scandinavian trolls who live in a land so frozen it may as well be Hyperborea, the globally popular children’s cartoon characters certainly have potential to be viewed this way. Worse, from an anti-white perspective, in the Moomins’ home country of Finland, the cute little trolls are intimately associated with the continued production of the white Finnish race. Porcelain Moomin mugs are present in almost every family kitchen there, and have proved to be stereotypically popular receptacles for child-seeking couples to spurt their sperm-samples into, prior to popping them into the refrigerator and taking them down to the fertility clinic, to make more little white babies with. As such, some think the Moomins clearly have to be stopped!

Hippo-Critical Race Theory

Being innately associated with snow, winter, the Arctic Circle and such, the sweet little hippo-people often prove particularly popular around Christmas-time, starring in books and cartoons, where they do things like harmlessly decorate Christmas trees, build snowmen, and burn Jews inside big wicker men to worship Our Great Lords Thor and Wotan.

Most of these products are based on a 1962 Moomins short story, The Fir Tree, but the Moomins are now a major global mass-media franchise. They even have a modern-day musical stage-show trotted out every year for the festive season, called Christmas Comes to Moominvalley, in which the trolls, who normally hibernate through Christmas, wake up early and have to be taught what the occasion is. Harmless entertainment for toddlers, one may have thought. But to today’s joyless Left, childhood and Christmas alike are things to be ruined, not enjoyed.

The Moomins turned 80 in 2025, thus making them precisely the same age as the post-WWII era. As such, things in their world which once seemed perfectly innocent and normal to everyone sane in 1945 have since been “problematized” to such an extent that they are now verboten. Some Moomins stage-shows, for example, feature—or used to feature—a cast-member who looks like this:

Supposedly, that represents a “racist” anti-black caricature, just like a gollywog. Except it isn’t supposed to be a black man at all, is it? It is in fact a fellow resident of Moominvalley called “Stinky.” It isn’t even human, but a goblin of some sort. Look, he has antennae. I know some of them have funny hairstyles these days, but how many Africans do you know who have actual full-blown feelers popping out of their foreheads?

Nonetheless, earlier this summer, an image of Stinky was withdrawn from an exhibition celebrating 80 years of the Moomins books at New York’s Brooklyn Public Library. Depicted as a mischievous smelly thief, a single complainant lectured the Library that Stinky had echoes of Jim Crow, so his portrait had to go immediately. Predictably, the Library complied. According to a perplexed Moomin marketing manager, “To our knowledge, this is the first time in the 80-year history of the Moomins that anyone has viewed Stinky as racist.” Get used to it, everything’s racist now. Even things like the Moomins which were originally explicitly designed to be supposedly anti-racist in the first place.

An “offensive” image of Stinky, acting like a typical, no-good nigga. In the jaundiced view of one New York “anti-racist,” anyway.

Racist Trolling

The Brooklyn Public Library exhibition was called Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open. Tove Jansson is the hippo-trolls’ original Left-wing, anti-Nazi, queer creator—an unlikely candidate to fill her work with hairy, anti-African fuzzy-wuzzy folk. The reference to the door always being open is to the Moomins’ tower-like home in the mystical, snow-covered realm of Moominvalley, into which any old random visitor is always welcome, even demonstrably criminal non-white ones like Stinky.

Over here in Britain, the Moomins’ 80th birthday was marked by our leading Leftist propaganda rag The Guardian providing a detailed in-house opinion on the friendly creatures entitled “The Guardian view on the Moomins at 80: in search of a home.” This noted how Jansson’s first Moomin book portrayed the trolls as a family of vulnerable climate-refugees, fleeing a massive flood to seek sanctuary in the shelter of Moominvalley. This was intended as an analogy for the mass movements of millions of white and Jewish refugees pouring across Europe at the end of WWII.

For The Guardian, the relevance to the current European situation with Middle Eastern and African refugees was simple. Just like the fictional white Moomins had once done, real white people had to let all the Stinkys barge on in through their own open door, even though as soon as they got inside, an alarmingly large proportion of them would probably run around making a colossal mess and stealing things from us, just like Jansson’s big black goblin did. We should not complain, however, because this was just their own age-old culture and way of life.

Another character the Moomins happily wave through their non-existent border-gate is the Groke, “a symbol of gloom who turns everything she touches into ice,” but who, once you get to know her properly, “is simply looking for warmth and not to be feared.” It’s just like all those imported Pakistanis that young white girls are taught to fear as being gang-rapists in the English Midlands by their racist, Islamophobic parents. Once little girls get to know them properly, they find they’re quite welcoming after all, showering them with gifts of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. And then gang-raping them anyway, but never mind, I’m sure The Guardian’s basic point still stands.

Another popular post-war British children’s character is Paddington Bear, a known illegal immigrant who arrives here from Peru on a boat one day. Paddington nonetheless does his best to fit in with the traditions of British life by eating lots of marmalade. But for The Guardian, Moomin characters like Stinky and the Groke, who stubbornly stuck to their own time-honored ways of stealing everything and freezing people to death with their bare hands, were morally far superior:

Unlike Paddington, that other postwar refugee, this is the newcomer narrative as acceptance rather than assimilation… Moominland is a fairytale, far from our 21st-century refugee crisis. But this magical world provides a quietly radical message of tolerance, inclusivity and hope… it is a place where you don’t have to fit in to belong.

It won’t be long before future editions are re-illustrated to show the Groke wearing a burka.

The Doors of Perception

Every year, the UK “celebrates” something called “Refugee Week.” For those who actually have to live alongside Stinky and the Groke, every week is Refugee Week, but professional activists are insulated from the unpleasant consequences of their own chosen policies. For Refugee Week 2025 they chose to co-opt the Moomins for their own propaganda purposes. Hence, the authorized slogan of the occasion was “The Door Is Always Open,” Europe’s entrance being held so by an obliging Finnish troll-being. The open-borders apologists pumped out a series of twee posters to groom your kids into letting future Stinkys and Grokes groom them in their turn.

A series of tie-in Moomin-related public “art” activities were organized across the country, with titles like “From Afghan Valleys to Moominvalley” put on by a member of the Bristol Refugee Artists’ Collective, “You Look As Though You Might Be a Relation” which aimed to “focus on the significance of belonging, forming family bonds beyond blood relations, and being open to connections with others, even those who might initially seem unfamiliar,” before building such individuals a big raft in a dockyard, and “What Will We Do Without Exile?” held in the Muslim-dominated town of Bradford. Here’s the description in full:

What Will We Do Without Exile? is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that creates a lush world within a refugee tent, inviting audiences to imagine life beyond occupation. While generations of Palestinian bodies have been forced into tents, their imaginations have never stopped reaching for liberation. What Will We Do Without Exile? pays tribute to imagination as resistance, as it celebrates the natural and cultural richness of Palestine, past, present and future. Through sight, touch, sound and stories, audience members are transported to a reality where the land and its people are finally free. What Will We Do Without Exile? honors the struggle and sacrifice of colonized people, and imagines a world where they have not only won their liberation, but where their resilience and ingenuity are recognized as invaluable examples for humanity in crisis.

I’d like to imagine a world where a “colonized people” have won their own national freedom back too: the people in question being the English people.

A Pride of Hippos

As Tove Jansson was a bit of a lesbian (when she felt like it), her big white children have also been co-opted by UK queers. In 2024, the nation’s first ever Moomin Pride event was held, in which the newly homosexual hippos were refashioned as queer trans icons, as “there’s a natural affinity between Moomins and the LGBTQ+ community.” How so? The Moomins walk around naked, but still have no visible penises or vaginas, thus demonstrating, in the words of top gay website Pink News that within the non-binary, nullo body of the average trans Moomin, “Masculine and feminine notions become blurred and the gender of the characters is rarely established.”

As they also allow absolutely anyone into their house, no matter how freakish they may look or behave, Moomin Tower also acts as a welcoming safe-space for queer refugees, with Moominpapa and Moominmama becoming the uber-tolerant unofficial heads of a “queer found family” of “radical acceptance” for all those real-world non-binary refugees whose actual, biological, families have rejected them for having stupid blue haircuts.

Here’s the glowing testimony of Lars, an 18-year-old thing from the southern English county of Devon, “who enjoys creating art inspired by Moomin characters”:

Moominvalley is such a safe, loving place that everyone is invited to. They are never judged by appearance or background – they are only judged on actions. I am a bisexual, trans male and when I was a child, I always knew I was different, but the Moomins showed me that it wasn’t a weird or wrong difference. I and so many other gay, trans, and autistic kids felt an acceptance through reading and watching these stories.

If they’re “only judged on actions,” never by appearance, how are the drawings of Stinky racist?

Race to the Finnish

Supposedly, Tove Jansson would have approved of all this. The Jansson family still help run her Moomin media empire today, and say they only ever allow the trolls to be used by charities whose causes they feel Tove would have supported herself, like Oxfam and the UN Refugee Agency.  It could be so. Certain Moomins characters apparently really are coded representations of Tove and her favorite lesboid lover, whilst some panels from her newspaper comic strip version of the franchise do indeed seem rather gay, as below.

Swallow what? You haven’t been drinking from another one of those used Finnish Moomin mugs again have you?

From the 1930s onwards, Jansson became a committed anti-fascist, drawing insulting cartoons of Adolf Hitler for the Leftist Finnish satire magazine Garm, so had she been around today, she really may have been some sort of queer-friendly, rapefugee-loving, Antifa type. Accordingly, some contemporary fans now think the Moomins were outright Communists. Here’s the opinion of a 19-year-old entity from New Zealand called Atlas, who must have the weight of the world on their shoulders:

Moominvalley feels like an antithesis to capitalism. There’s no ruling class, no working class, everyone is just drinking raspberry juice and vibing. You don’t have to work yourself to the grave to make strangers rich – that is the norm to us, but, to the inhabitants of Moominvalley, it’s an unheard-of concept that they would find horrifying.

Little wonder, then, that Left-wing activists have co-opted the Moomins and their associated spin-off characters to promote their precious “anti-fascist” cause via stickers and memes posted on walls across Europe and online.

Heil Hippo!

But, being all-time icons of whiteness, there is also obvious potential for right-wing opponents to do the precise reverse, and enlist the Moomins for their own cause of returning to a white Europe with a closed-door immigration policy, not an open-door one full of Stinkys. Logically, you’d think this is the exact equivalent of the Left’s own politicized Moomin campaign in reverse, meaning Antifas could not legitimately complain about it—but, as usual, they do so anyway, as in this pitiable wail from some silly girl who moans that “I feel personally offended [by a right-wing Moomin sticker] because I love Moomins and call my cats Moomintrollen.”

The official marketing title of the Moomins’ 80th anniversary was simply “Moomin 80,” but so perilously Nazi have some people tried to make them become, maybe it should actually have been “Moomin 88.” There is an actual full-blown academic study of the allegedly pressing topic of Nazi Moomins, contained within a 2023 book called Feminist Media Studies. Here exists a chapter by someone named Maria Darwish, who self-identifies as being “a PhD candidate in Gender Studies” at a Swedish university. As part of her PhD, Maria has been searching social media and capturing highly dangerous Moomin-related images like these:

Hitler didn’t invade Finland, though. That was Stalin.

Darwish’s study presents the core thesis that, being associated with snowy forests and unspoilt woodland areas, the Moomins make for great ecofascist icons, and would definitely have been Savitri Devi’s all-time favorite cartoon characters. As the hippo-trolls are really, really cute, Darwish argues they could easily become potential new meme-successors to Pepe the Frog, being used to “cute-wash” fascism. Ultra-right groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement could cunningly begin drawing kids into the world of Hitler-worship with fun Moomin pics before ultimately explaining how these suspiciously super-white beings would actually want the targeted toddlers to grow up to kill the Jews. As the recruitment slogan says, “Nazism: come for the Moomins – stay for the genocide!”

Salon Kitty

The adorable image below, of Adolf Hitler feeding some deer, was apparently Savitri Devi’s favorite photograph of her beloved Führer:

Darwish says neo-Nazis now spread the same imagine online “as a strategy to present Hitler, and thereby fascism, as good, and communicate a belief in the natural compassion, and thereby the virtuousness, of whiteness.” The aim is to attract recruits from amongst the traditionally slightly Hitler-averse demographics of young women and soppy little girls, the end result being an alleged wave of online extremists now posing half as Nazis, half as committed kitten-cuddlers.

How can what Darwish terms “cuteness propaganda” turn a 7-year-old girl into Leni Riefenstahl? The qualified Gender Studies scholar explains at length:

Cuteness is a condensed signifier for a binary Manichean logic, representing what is good versus bad. As feminized aesthetics, like the color pink, transfers associations of kindness, peace and softness onto its setting, so does elements of cuteness influence its overall context. Drawing on cuteness represses other signifiers, meaning that cuteness, or positive affect in general, is a rhetorical tool that lessens the need for ideological defense. The more soft, happy, and uplifting a stance appears, the less it must defend its ideological underpinnings. Hitler’s ‘special bond’ with animals signifies compassion and kindness towards the innocent, and the innocence lends itself to Hitler and consequently compromises his status as a symbol of evil … The cuteness propaganda may be understood to communicate that fascism is inherently moral, loving, and natural, and therefore trustworthy as a legitimate political option. As a flattening rhetorical means, cuteness and childhood imaginaries support a discursive horizon where the good is easily separated from the bad. Consequently, the proponent is called to join ‘the good side’.

Meanwhile, when online kawaii images of neo-Nazi kittens and Moomins are aimed specifically at men and little boys, rather than towards their more usual female counterparts, the following intended effect is supposed to be produced:

Cuteness presented alongside militarism serves as a rhetorical strategy in making the protector a legitimate dominator [over women and children] by accentuating the act of [military] sacrifice itself, and by offering an affective representation of what the protector shall sacrifice himself for: innocence and righteousness. The ecofascist discourse invites the proponent to defend Nature, women, whiteness, tradition, culture, and the future itself from infringement [by the forces of the Great Replacement].

It seems some men like pussies too, not just Tove Jansson.

Snuff Out Your Kin

Partcularly dangerous is one online image of the Moomins’ good friend Snufkin, seen here as a lonely wanderer through Nature. A drawing of Snufkin playing a flute within a field of colorful tulips has been digitally altered to make it appear as if he is thereby using music-magic to cause the common Esoteric Nazism symbol of the Black Sun to rise once again, thereby ushering in the Fourth Reich:

Of Snufkin’s esoteric rune-magic, Darwish says:

Snufkin represents an ambivalent masculine figure in the ecofascist discourse. The role of a free wanderer is traditionally assigned to men, and similarly, Snufkin signifies a wise and wistful vagabond. Freedom in an ecofascist discourse means freedom from the decadence and impurities of modern industrialized and multicultural society, and from unwelcome aliens. Snufkin’s credibility as a masculine ecofascist symbol lies primarily in that he embodies such a free and independent wanderer in tune with Nature. Inhabiting deep and esoteric qualities, he knows the mysteries of the vastness beyond the horizon: ‘Our’ heritage and where ‘we’ come from. Hence, he is also one to identify with in meditation and in silence, perhaps even in bad times [like the current era of the Great Replacement].

Why is “our” and “we” in inverted commas there? Presumably Darwish herself is white too, isn’t she, every bit as much as a Moomin is? She attempts to portray the campaigners peddling Nazi Moomin memes as being extremist lunatics. There is indeed something rather mentally unbalanced about seriously trying to groom little girls into Nazism by showing them photographs of Wehrmacht trooper helmets with lovely baby kittens in them. But how likely, really, is such a scheme to work? Yet, ultimately, the greater psychopathology is hers.

Darwish implies that Right-wing co-opting of Moomins is dangerous on the grounds that, when presented under a neo-Nazi aegis, “The Moomins signify childhood, wholesomeness, and comfort, but also the familiarity of the heterosexual nuclear family with defined gender roles.” So we are supposed to deride Right-wing presentations of the Moomins as societally normal (white Moominpapa, white Moominmama, white Moominbaby) as being evil… whilst simultaneously being expected to applaud Left-wing presentations of the Moomins as being societally abnormal instead (black Moominpapa, white Moominotherpapa, mixed-race non-binary Moominbaby). What the Snufkin is wrong with things like “childhood, wholesomeness, and comfort,” or “the heterosexual nuclear family with defined gender roles?”

As always, the message from contemporary Regime pseudo-academia is clear. Libeling the white race is admirable. Defending it is wicked. The moral and political double-standards at play here are more easily spotted than Stinky in a snowstorm.